The problem the
Monthly's getting at is not confined to news stories with loaded
lead-ins. ("Dogged by criticism of his role in the Lewinsky
case, President Clinton today raised a man from the dead
with the slightest touch of his hand.") It's just as common,
and has an even longer history, in the portentous-sounding
but vapid zingers that end the typical TV or radio news
report. ("The president may have conquered death today.
Whether he can beat Kenneth Starr tomorrow  is not so clear.") And whether used at the beginning of a
story or the end, such fillips are not the real problem. The
menace is the incredibly shallow, incurious, and cynical
view of life that lies behind them.

Within limits, the effort to put
attitude into a news story is a worthy one - or, at a
minimum, one this magazine should be slow to condemn. In one
way or another it has urged for years that reporters use as
many tools as they can to share what they've seen - what
they know - with the reader. It was in this very magazine, a
mere 25 years ago, that I wrote (at the dictation suggestion
of the editor) a review of Ward Just's book of short
stories, The Congressman Who
Loved Flaubert. The point
of that review, and of other Monthly
articles passim, was
that a Flaubert-like, novelistic sensibility can add to a
full understanding of public life. This was in contrast to
the preceding "just the facts" wire-service ethic that led
some of the funniest people in the press to write dull,
constipated stories and to use euphemisms like "tired and
emotional" to describe politicians who were drunk and
stuporous on the Senate floor.

Yes, there should be places where
the facts come through straight and plain. The lead of a
story is usually such a place. Yes, there should be clues to
the reader about what is a clear-as-we-can-make-it factual
summary and what is the extra interpretation. But trying to
move beyond the straight facts is not the big problem
here.

The problem, I think, is that the
people writing these stories are less interested, and
therefore less interesting, than reporters really need to
be. The mark of a great reporter is boundless curiosity - a
desire to find out all there is to know. Name your era, and
anyone we think of as a great reporter from that time was
distinguished by omnivorous curiosity. Stephen Crane in
Cuba. Charles Dickens roaming through America. John Hersey
in Hiroshima. James Agee in the South. The grossly
underrated John Gunther, in his Inside series of books. They
made their mistakes, but they wanted to learn every single
thing they could about as many topics as they could.

Today's most famous journalists, by
comparison, (a) spend a much larger proportion of their time
spitting out opinions and predictions, especially on TV,
rather than taking in new material, and (b) are curious
about a much narrower slice of the world. It's somewhat
exaggerated, but basically fair, to say that today's pundit
and star political-writer class is not driven by fascination
about the world in general, or even about politics in the
broadest sense. Rather, its members are fascinated by one
specific question: which politicians are gaining or losing
power. That's why they package every public event in a
"Dogged by criticism" wrapping. That's why they spend so
much time on pointless prediction and speculation about
future shifts in strength. That's also why they're so
cynical, since boiling life down to this one simple struggle
is as deadening as any other reductionist view. (Imagine a
coroner who let his dealings with other people be reduced to
calculations of how long before they showed up on his
slab.)

The game of musical chairs that
leaves some people in office and some out is a legitimate
topic. But it makes up about 2 percent of what's significant
and interesting in life. As long as it occupies most of the
imagination of the political-writer class, their claim on
the public imagination will shrink.